It sounds like you are saying you like to listen to recordings of live performances because it introduces variations. The terms vibe and felt don't really have meaning for me. Are you saying you see it as a cover of the original song by the original artist?
FWIW, there are fans of bands like the Grateful Dead, and Phish, who collect literally hundreds of recordings of different concerts, and bounce back and forth listening to the different performances - many of the same songs, but played a little differently one night than the next.
The Grateful Dead were famous for normally not having a setlist, and playing different songs from their repertoire every night (obviously, some songs would be more frequently repeated as time went by) - often they'd play 2-3 shows over consecutive nights at a given venue and play different songs every night, and many people would attend the entire run of shows, rather than just one (so, a mini-series of concerts?). And, often, they wouldn't play one song, and stop, and then play the next - instead, they'd start with one song and end up 45 minutes later having played 5 different songs without ever stopping - blending/jamming their way from one song to the next. Anyway, some fans would like one run of shows more than some other, but with no universal consensus as to which was the One True Concert performance. Often they were playing songs that didn't sound nearly as good on the old studio recordings, and other times they were playing songs that might not appear on studio recordings until years later, if ever.
As well, some of the songs would evolve over their history of being played live, adding some parts, changing others, modifying lyrics, before they ever got recorded in a studio. You could consider this "beta testing" a song, but with software it is usually the case that most will agree the final version after beta testing is the best/canonical version, but when a song varies over time, you'll find people who like the latest version and others who prefer earlier versions. So, it becomes
very difficult to say, "well,
this one is the original and
that one is a cover".
Similar things happen in jazz, where you may have an original artist/group who wrote a song (or sometimes a song will get listed as "traditional" because it goes back so far, with so many changes along the way, that nobody knows where it originated), but then the song gets passed around and modified and tweaked by other musicians and there can be considerable debate over who played it better, and even if you can agree on an artist, then which of their performances of it is best? And sometimes a musician will write a song, perform it with a bunch of other musicians, who will improvise bits and make minor variations that the original artist might then incorporate back into their (current) version.
And don't even get started on classical music - there are no
original recordings Bach, or Beethoven, or a huge number of other beloved composers. There are
only modern (in the last century) performances of their works to listen to. Many of those can vary wildly in sound. Which one is correct? Bach is not here to say, neither is Beethoven. You can't buy "Beethoven's Symphony No. 6", you can only buy one (or more) of hundreds of different recordings of it (I have several). For some recordings, the key factor in deciding may be the orchestra, the conductor, the soloist(s) (if any), the label, etc. For, say, Brahms' Violin Concerto, I strongly prefer Jascha Heifetz as the violinist, though many have equally valid reasons to prefer Itzhak Perlman or someone else.
What I'm trying to get at is, oftentimes there is no one canonical performance of a given song, so no other performance is necessarily a cover, and... that's a good thing. Music evolves over time. Some of the evolution is good, some not so much. Sometimes artists do interpretations of their own songs, in concert, that are better than the originals, sometimes they're worse, sometimes they're just different. It sound like you're thinking that a group writes, records, and publishes a song, and that's the canonical version and everything that comes after is cover... and that's much too simplistic of a black & white interpretation of how it works.
